Thursday, July 12, 2007

An excerpt from an essay today, "It's the Ideology, Stupid!" in Islam-Watch by Warner MacKenzie:

The West’s propensity for ignorance is nothing short of astounding when one considers that, in this first decade of the 21st century, a veritable gold mine of information, on any topic, is available at one’s fingertips via the internet. Never before have books on the subject of Islamic history and terrorism been so prolific, yet the same old dangerously erroneous opinions on the causes of Islamic violence remain as popular, uninformed and widespread as ever.

Seemingly unwilling to make the effort to research the true causes of modern Islamist violence, many in the West, including the media, are ever ready to proffer an autoethnophobic (cultural self-loathing) root-cause as to how “We Westerners must have, somehow, caused the problem and therefore deserve what we are getting”. The apologists, propagandists and appeasers continue to confidently promote the view that Islamic terrorism is born of, and nurtured by, poverty, social marginalisation, and Islamophobic bigotry. A raft of other exculpatory justifications for the current global violence is put forward with the one common theme that, in one way or another, the West is to blame and its chickens are simply coming home to roost. So when the recent revelation emerged that a number of medical professionals were involved in two failed terrorist attacks in Britain, the naively deluded went into a confused tailspin, scratching their, cognitively dissonant heads. Their beloved paradigm of the disempowered, impoverished and alienated Muslim now had more holes than a lace tablecloth. No doubt they are busily readjusting their theories to explain how these privileged, intelligent, middle-class professionals could be driven to their wits-end, and forced to lash out with such blind destructive fury at the “evil” West.